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HOW TO GET A PLOT
Theme and story in the play THE GERMINAL IDEA THE SOURCES OF PLOT HOW TO GATHER IDEAS FOR PLOTS The plot-germ WHAT SHALL YOU WRITE ABOUT? germinal idea HOW TO GET A PLOT You must not alone know what a plot is, but you must be able to originate plots before you can write in action. In the first place let it be understood that the author does not and can not trust to inspiration alone. He does not wait until genius burns. He touches a match to it and fans the flame until it is glowing brightly. He learns to regard writing as an employment as well as a recreation. He knows that to succeed he must gain the habit of plotting and that the way to do this is to write plots until plot writing becomes a habit and not a Mystery. Almost any person can think of one good idea for a play if he or she thinks bard enough. Some can think of a dozen before what may be termed their natural supply of ideas is exhausted. But one plot or one dozen plots will not advance one very far along the road to success. It may even be that the sale of some of these will unfit a student for further work, giving him a feeling of overconfidence. It has often been said, and with entire truth, that the worst luck that possibly could befall the beginner is the sale of one or two plays just at the start. The work seems to be too easy. The aspirant devotes no further time to study and when sales cease decides that editors are stealing the plays and stops writing, disgusted. Solid, lasting success is not built upon the chance sale of one or two plays. It is based upon a close study of photoplay writing followed by careful and intelligent marketing. Do not wait for inspiration. Study the art of plotting as a business and remember that the more you plot the more easy will plotting become until, with full development, the plot almost automatically forms once the suggestion is gained. So expert do some writers become that a mere suggestion received will cause the entire plot to suggest itself in complete form. Take comfort in the thought that the labor of the start will bring a lasting ease that will more than repay the hard work. To the beginner the simplest plan probably will be to sit down and reason a plot out. You think of a man and a woman. What happens to them? Who are they? Are they married or unmarried? Perhaps you decide that they are husband and wife. What then? What is there in their married life that makes it more interesting than the married lives of other men and women? Perhaps you answer this very unoriginally by saying that they are unhappy. Very well, but why? There must be some reason. Does he drink? Is he inconstant? Is he brutal? Perhaps you decide that he drinks. What are you going to do about it? Are you going to try to free the woman from her bonds or will you require her to stand by and seek to effect a cure? You think that perhaps it will make a better story if she seeks to reform him. Probably it will. How do you intend that this shall be done? Does she argue with him or seek to shock him into a realization of his condition? Does she work alone or do others aid her? Perhaps it will work well if she seeks the aid of a physician. Probably it will help if the physician was the husband's rival before marriage. Shall he be the woman's present lover or not? It will be better and more in accord with her character if their relations are without reproach. You are able now to introduce the element of jealousy. The brutalized husband sees the conference. He can imagine but one reason. Without departing from the point aimed at, a new complication has been added that is not a sub-plot but a part of the main theme, offering large possibilities for dramatic situation. In the same way you pass in mental review the things that might happen, discarding some and adopting others until you have your complete story. Perhaps the husband seeks to be revenged upon his supposed rival. He is intoxicated and lost to all sense of proportion. He goes to the house of the physician. His wife, searching for him, traces him there. You work eventually to this plot: Dave Vroom and Hartley Manley are rivals for the hand of Dora Gladden. Dave wins and, once married, gives way to the intemperate habits he has previously kept hidden from the world. Things go from bad to worse until Dave in one of his spells strikes and so severely injures her that she is forced to seek the services of Hartley. They seek to persuade Dave to enter a cure, but Dave. insanely jealous, believes that they seek to be rid of him merely that they may be free to carry on the liaison. A court order is procured and Dave, evading service, escapes from his home and searches for Hartley. Hartley is out on a case and returns late in the evening. Dave comes through the window of the study and accuses him of trying to railroad him. Hartley tries to explain, but Dave is deaf to reason. He strikes Hartley and, believing that he has killed him, seeks to escape through the hall. He opens the door to a closet instead of the one to the hall. This contains a skeleton mounted upon a stand. The violence with which Dave opens the door causes the stand to fall forward and to Dave's disordered imagination it seems that the skeleton seeks to punish his crime. Hartley recovers and tries to interpose, but Dave, temporarily a maniac, believes him to be his ghost come to the skeleton's aid. He attacks him anew and is strangling him when Dora comes upon them. With her assistance Hartley overpowers Dave. Brain fever follows the excitement and Dave is nursed back to life by Dora and Hartley, the shock having cured him of his desire for drink. This should make a pretty fair story, the scenes with the skeleton supplying the sensation and also the reason why Dave changes. It may be of interest to the reader to know that the story was evolved while paragraph five was being written and that it required less than ten minutes to get the idea and to work it out. In the early stages of plot building it may take a day or two to get the idea in good form, but with each succeeding plot written will come greater facility. In this instance as soon as the physician was suggested the remainder of the play flashed as a whole. The second method of plotting is to work from a climax instead of a start. In other words, you first invent a big scene and then a reason for that scene. In the plot above you would first have thought of the drink-crazed man wrestling with a skeleton in a physician's office. Then you would have found a reason for his being there and so would have kept on working backward until you reached the start, or could have imagined the climax and then the start before filling in the middle action. Or you may imagine a climax in which a girl, to save her sweetheart from being electrocuted until his mother can reach the Governpr with a fresh appeal, thrusts her hand into the dynamo that is generating the current that presently will be used to shock to death the man she loves. Here you have a situation that is decidedly dramatic, but you do not "know what it is all about. One thing is clear. The man must be innocent of the crime for which he is condemned to death. If he is not innocent, he deserves to die and he is unworthy of the sacrifice the girl makes. This, of course, requires that he shall have been convicted upon perjured evidence. Then it is required that there shall develop some turn that will give to the mother fresh evidence too late to reach the Governor. She cannot appeal to the Warden to delay the execution. The Warden is given a certain latitude, and he has gone to the limit of this time already. That is all he can do. He cannot act as a court of appeal. There is no time to reach the Governor. Here the telephone suggests itself, and some reason must be found why the telephone may not be used. This found, it is necessary to account for the girl and her presence within the prison walls. The natural move would be to make her the daughter of the warden, but generally the warden removes his family from the prison precincts before an execution, provided that they live within the walls. Some other reason must be found. A good one would be that she disguises herself as a man and gets work inside in order to be near her sweetheart even though she niay not be with him, and the work must be as helper to the electrician since. no one else would be allowed in the dynamo room at such a time. Now you are working on a regular plan. You have your start, your finish and your middle action. Perhaps from the start you devise an even better line of action leading to a wholly different climax and still have the original climax to be used later in another plot. In either of these methods you will find that you are never required to follow any hard and fast development but are at liberty to let the story wander where it will. If you do not like the way it travels you can go back to the point of deviation and pursue the original line, but often the new leach will result in a better story than the one first thought of and leave you with material on your hands that can be used some other time. Imagine a circle with a dot in the centre. The dot represents your start or your ending as the case may be. From that dot you can reach any part in the circumference, each point representing a different ending, and you may go in a straight line or waved as will best suit your need. At no time are you required to follow the straight line or to strike any particular point in the circumference of climax. Plotting is much like writing figures. The greater the number of factors used, the greater your choice. There are nine digits and a naught These in combination can be made to express any sum. With a single figure you have but nine variants. With two you have ninety-nine, with three points you have a thousand more. There may be a thousand endings to any start or as many starts to a single ending. It is your task to find a combination that has not been used before. These two forms of plotting are those most commonly used. A third is to take a definite suggestion and see what you can do with it. You tell yourself that you will write about a country parson, a dashing actress, a story of army life or something about an automobile. Then you think of all the things you can do and do that which best pleases your fancy. A fourth way is to work from a press clipping or similar suggestion. This differs from the preceding method only in that you have more material to start with. This other suggestion may even be some other story if only you will be careful to take a suggestion and not the story itself. You are supposed to get a hint but not a complete plot, just as the press item should suggest something else and not itself if you would avoid the risk of writing something that someone else undoubtedly will write and try to sell. There never was a promising press clip that has not been seized upon by some would-be author and merely transferred to paper without translation. Every great catastrophe is immediately followed by a flood of stories more or less accurately relating the incident. If a great ocean liner sinks a thousand stories may be written. This is not an exaggeration. There may be one thousand stories actually written dealing with a disaster such as that of the Titanic. The Editor will not take a single one. Unless he has rushed one into production a few hours after the first extra came out, he will be afraid that some other studio will get one out ahead of him. In no case is there time for the free lance author to write and submit such a story with the slightest chance of acceptance. Anything of a like nature will have the same result in proportionate degree. Authors with no imagination will pounce upon these ready-made stories and send them out, perhaps thinly disguised, in the conviction that the story must sell because it is so timely, oblivious to the fact that others must have done the same and to the counter-fact that it will not be timely six months from now, although the film will still be making the rounds of the smaller theaters then. To get the best results, do not use the clipping for a story but to suggest something else. If an excursion steamer burns to the water edge, do not have a steamer burning to the water edge. Get something different. To the highly trained imagination a hotel fire in which scores are burned may suggest a comedy over the argument as to which member of the household shall build the morning fire or be the basis for a farce in which the janitor, the heating apparatus, a tip and a tenant are the component parts. Such a story might sell where a blazing hotel would be undesirable. Perhaps, instead, it may be that some individual act of bravery may appeal to the author where the story as a whole may be useless and he will turn this around. Perhaps, for example, the paper tells how Mrs. O'Grady, having little Minnie Roscoe in charge, was faithful to her promise to Minnie's mother and saved the child instead of her own. That does not suggest very strongly the story of Bill Brown, traveling across the desert with his wife and the girl that his chum, Dick Sprague, is to marry when they get to their camp. They lose their way. Bill and his wife deny themselves water to keep alive the girl, less used to desert hardships. At the last moment they find a waterhole surrounded by a gold mine and all ends happily. The story is not much like the story of Mrs. O'Grady, but one incident suggested the other and shows how press clips should be used. It is the same way with other fiction and photoplay stories. Do not repeat them. Let them suggest something else to you. Many writers, when their plotting minds grow dull, read the plots of others —not to get any particular suggestion, but merely to get into the plotting atmosphere. They take nothing of what they have read. But other story plots can do more than this. A single phrase or perhaps a paragraph will suggest a story wholly different from the one the author has Written. Perhaps the author has written something that is not true to facts. The second author writes a story that is, not a paraphrase of the other story, but a new one. Perhaps it is a story of the stage, written by one who guesses at his facts. The man who knows gives a snort and writes a story with the proper color just to show how it should be done. To give a concrete example, a well-known writer did a little story of the circus. He knew more about music than he did about "high traps, " aifd he wrote a story of a gymnast and a bass drummer. When the bass drum banged his instrument it was the signal to the flying man to grasp the bar of the swing. Because he hated the gymnast the drummer hit too early one night, the trapeze artist closed his hands too soon, overshot the net and broke his neck. 22. The story was recalled some years later by another writer who knew more about the circus and knew that no high-priced gymnast is going to put his life into the hands of a cheap drummer in a circus band. He knew that the work was all done by counts. He wrote a story in which the green drummer fell in love with the gymnast's wife. The stress the bandmaster had laid upon the banging of the drum as the man was about to grasp the bar led into the same error the first drummer made. He hit the drum too soon, with the only result that he was fired that same evening. The story was suggested by the first, but they were utterly unlike in plot as well as facts. It is permissible to derive inspiration but not plot from the work of another, as will be more clearly set forth in the chapter on copyrights. To take more than this will be stealing. There may be no copyright prosecution, but the author may be recognized as a "borrower" and his work avoided in future. In this connection it should be remembered that most studios have someone whose business it is to keep in touch with new literature as well as others who know the classics. If a story does by any chance escape scrutiny, there will be many who will write the company advising them of the theft. Old vaudeville acts, the so-called nigger acts, specialties, sketches and similar material of the stage are known to Editors and can be used only with material alteration. They are made but generally they are not purchased, but written by someone in the studio who has a good memory. This is particularly true of comedy. Sometimes inversion works well. It will recall Charles A. Dana's advice to a new reporter whom he told that a story of a dog biting a man was not very newsy, but if the man should bite the dog it would be worth a column. You expect a man to enter through the front door when he comes home. If you can find some reason why he should climb to the roof and drop through the chimney you have a better or at least a more original plot. In the same way if a bridal couple are married and live happily ever after it does not make as good a story as though the man turned from the altar to find that he was not married at all because the bride was a man or because she was already married, and her husband, whom all supposed to have been lost at sea, was waiting at the entrance to the church. Inversion is a decidedly valuable aid, but it should be used only by those who have first learned to write straight plots, since it requires an ample knowledge of plotting to turn plots inside out and make the wrong side look like the right. In the same way combination of ideas or combination with inversion works well when expertly done. Straight combination is the merging of two ideas to obtain a third. To take a magazine story, here is the original plot of one story: A grain speculator corners wheat, forcing up the price of bread. He is kidnapped and held prisoner. Fabulous prices are charged for bread and water, and he must pay these to eat and drink. When he has disgorged his profits, he is permitted to depart. This story is perhaps too old to be remembered by many. A second story has been used more than once with slightly different treatment. These are the essential facts. There is a shipwreck. A financier who has been amusing himself telling the crew of the niceties of high finance is cast ashore. He is too flabby to do hard work. The men salvage much of the cargo, hut applying his own laws of supply and demand make him pay fancy prices and are taken off the island comparatively affluent. From these two, or at least apparently from these two, came a more recent story, which offers some of the points of each in this combination: Two men are cast away. Previously one has been justifying to the other his action in taking over this other's bankrupt business, reorganizing it and selling out at a profit of $100, 000. He contended that the second man was not businesslike and that since he (the speaker) had revived the dead business he was entitled to the profit on it. The bankrupt makes the shore and takes possession. The other man is stranded on a rock. The bankrupt not only makes him pay rental for coming upon the island, but makes him pay fabulous sums for meals and spring water. When the $100, 000 is gone the 'bankrupt amuses himself by setting the capitalist to work, sitting in the shade and watching him. He pays in script. The capitalist works overtime. When they are rescued they find that the capitalist not alone has earned his $100, 000 back, but that through careless accounting the bankrupt now owes him an additional $50, 000, proving the point the capitalist had sought to make. It is possible, even probable, that the writer never saw the other stories, but they offer so excellent an example of combination they are given here for comparison. Facts and themes may also be combined. It is known that the magnetic needle of the compass points approximately to the north. It is known that iron or steel near the compass needle will deflect it. Combination of these two facts have brought many plots along different lines. A locomotive cannot pull a train if the drivers do not grip the track. Lanterns contain signal oil, a composition of lard and oil. The brakeman spills the oil from his lantern on the track and prevents the fast express on the up grade from crashing into the freight. Another form of plotting is to select some suggestive title and work from that. This may sound absurd to the untrained writer, but it is used by many experienced authors with decided success. It is not necessary that the title should be self-explanatory. Take for example the title "Just Around the Corner. " Almost anything may be just around the corner, from happiness to a policeman. Later you may think of a better title and retain the original to suggest another plot. Building a plot from a story may seem like building a barrel around a bunghole, but sometimes the scheme will work when no other will. If a suggestive title is used, it should not be retained if it reveals too clearly the idea of the play. 29. These are the methods most generally in use. Another scheme that has been suggested (by a Boston newspaper) is the Idea Machine. This may be a set of packs of cards about fifty each. Part of them are nouns, others adjectives or verbs. Each pack is shuffled and one of each is drawn at random. You will get a meaningless jumble, but often there will be a plot suggestion. Perhaps the draw will show: "Lawyer—counterfeits—woman—runs—automobile. " This may suggest to you a story in which a lawyer induces a woman to pose as the lost heiress to a large estate, using his knowledge, of family affairs gained as its counsel to post her on seemingly hidden affairs. The deception is discovered and the lawyer and his accomplice are put to flight, possibly an automobile chase supplying the sensational climax. If you have a better opinion of lawyers, perhaps he is the one who discovers the imposition and puts the woman and her accomplices to flight. The idea will serve merely to assemble some impossible factors which may be combined into an idea. Like writing to titles, it may seem to be absurd, but some established authors report excellent results. The cards should be of varying colors to prevent their becoming mixed. Any stationer can get card index cards in five or more colors, or perhaps the local printer will cut them from stock on hand without much cost. It is well to study to the point of thorough understanding all of these schemes for plotting since one may be useful at a time when none of the others will serve to bring a suggestion. It is never wise to have but a single method of obtaining plots. If this one method temporarily fails you are helpless. It will generally be found that if plotting is dropped for a time especial effort is required to get back into the habit. On the other hand plotting too long continued, without rest, may bring a state of mental inaction that only rest or a change of work will correct. It will be found that there are times when the mind is more plot-active than at others. Plots follow one another in rapid succession, but none of them will work out into complete action at the moment. For this reason it is well to have a plot book. This differs from the idea file already referred to since this is for the storage of plots and not suggestion. For this some form of loose-leaf system is best that the used plots may be removed. This does not mean an investment of several dollars for a book and punched paper. You can use ordinary paper and a paper clip. There is a form of clip that is provided with detachable lever handles that when removed make a neat binding, or there are several forms of spring back binders that do not cost above half a dollar, and which do not require specially punched paper. Elaborate color systems should not be employed as a color for each play classification, as often you can turn your plot from comedy into drama or the reverse. 34. Keep in this file all plots good and bad. Perhaps by combination you can make one good plot from two or more poor ones. It may be that the materials in your story are not harmonious. One story, done by the Edison company, started with a theatrical man in Turkey looking for a harem to use as a comic opera chorus. Somehow it did not seem to work. A life-insurance agent half-plot was taken ovgr and the theatrical man became an insurance agent anxious to offer the Sultan himself wholesale rates if he insured the entire harem. As such the story sold, but the picture was made by a field company working in an old skating rink and the discovery of the skates led to another change. The hero became an agent for roller skates, he found an old sweetheart in the harem. She was a champion skater. They put the harem on skates and skated away while the harem fell down singly and collectively. As a general thing the best plots are those which come easiest to you and resolve themselves into action with the least effort This is because you have the plot fully assimilated and can put it down without bothering about details. The story that is built up, scene by scene, may be a better piece of development, but it may convey the unconscious suggestion of labor to the spectator and tire him. It is a good plan not to attempt the final writing of the plot until you have the details perfectly aligned. Professional dancers have a term—elevation—that admirably illustrates this quality. A dancer with good elevation seems to float in the air and touch the floor with his feet, instead of springing from it. You are not permitted to see that their dancing is hard work and so it is far more pleasing than the work of some who deliberately show how hard their work is that they may gain full credit in immediate applause instead of future reputation. It is the same way with photoplay. Apparent absence of effort gives the greatest charm; you should so plot that your story seems to unfold itself. Unless you wait until your plot does develop naturally, your labored development will suggest a soldier in a sentry box trying to do free-hand gymnastics. He is doing his best, but he is cramped. Do not deal with the plot that too intimately concerns yourself or your friends. It may be a great joke to put oldMr. Brown or the erratic Miss Jones in a picture, but it may not make a very good plot, and you want a plot that will interest those who do not know Mr. Brown or Miss Jones. Use them for types, but not for victims. Least of all put yourself into a story or imagine yourself to be the hero of the story you write. This is not plot building but silly day dreaming. It has been said that plotting should depend upon work and not upon inspiration, but this does not mean that you should make a plodding business of it. You are not to ignore inspiration, but to teach it to answer to your call instead of falling back on lack of inspiration as an excuse for loafing. To be a good workman you must train your inspiration through effort and arrive at a point where you can write good comedies, if that is your line, while your heart overflows with grief and good drama when you want to shout for very joy. At first it will be labor alone, but learn to find pleasure and inspiration in your labor or you will always be a laborer and never an artist writer. category:The writing process category:Sources of plot